Various proposals have been made to stably supply power to a large number of power consuming devices arranged inside homes, office, buildings, and the like. For example, Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2007-020260 discloses a power supply system including:
a storage battery configured to be charged with power from a lamp line,
a converting unit connected between a watt-hour meter and a home switchboard, and configured to control the storage battery and to convert supplied DC power into commercial AC power, and
means for linking control of a charge/discharge operation of the storage battery to a power rate of the power supplied from the lamp line.
The power supply system further includes:
a controller capable of performing communication with the converting unit,
a communication device having functions to control devices and to measure states, and connected to the controller, and
means for collecting consumed power amounts and states of the devices, and transmitting the consumed power amounts and the states to the communication device.
Then, in Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2007-020260, a device controller 900 creates control data of devices 50n from the operation states and the consumed power of the devices 50n so as to suppress a peak of power consumption, and controls discharging of a storage battery 202 by controlling the devices 50n and controlling an operation of a converting unit 201 so as to comply with the entire consumed power (see the paragraph [0045] of Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2007-020260).
Further, a power packet system that enables supply and reception between customers in an end-to-end manner by delivering power energy with a power packet to which heater information is attached is known from Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2011-142771.